


baby, we'll be fine

by traveller



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-23
Updated: 2009-06-23
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:12:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traveller/pseuds/traveller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite>They met in the bathroom.</cite></p>
            </blockquote>





	baby, we'll be fine

He doesn't hear the key in the lock, despite the silence, but he does hear the door close, a heavy, solid sound, and he does hear the familiar thud thud of a pair of Louboutins being kicked off to land just down the hall. The rustle of shopping bags, the jingle of keys.

Silence now, she's seeing his own shoes now, neatly lined up under her foyer table. He can't hear her sigh, maybe it's imagination that supplies that gust of breath; he can't hear her bare feet coming up the thickly carpeted stairs, maybe that steady beat is his heart.

He's curled on the sofa in the room with the view, chin on his fist, watching the city sparkle below.

"Hey, baby." Her words are carried on a waft of Bulgari. The sofa doesn't dip when she settles next to him, she doesn't say that he's in that mood again, she doesn't say he should've called. She just brushes his hair off his forehead after he turns to kiss her cheek, she just snuggles close and watches with him, side by side, until the sky turns from black to violet to blue at last.

::

Quarter to what, ass o'clock, o-dark-whatever, if he didn't recognize the perfume of the person shaking him awake he'd be having something resembling a massive coronary right now; as it is his heart still pounds like the twenty-fourth mile of a marathon. He pushes at her hands.

"Go away. Or stay. I don't care. God, even the _dog_ waits 'til the sun is up." He rolls away, presses his face into the pillows, pulls the duvet up higher.

"The early bird catches the sample sale," she chirps back, and snatches away his covers. Goosebumps prickle on his thighs, and the urge to go completely fetal is rising.

He flattens himself out instead, eyes tightly shut, arms crossed over his chest. "Time."

"We have to be in New York by seven."

"Which means."

"You can sleep on the plane," she offers, sugary enough to kill. Denim hits him in the face, and he inhales deeply, recoiling even as he does.

"Did you get these off the floor?"

::

They met in the bathroom. Somebody's apartment, somewhere in SoHo, both of them at home away from home. She was peeing, he was turning pretty much mid-step, mid-air, headed back for the door, and she was laughing, his ears were burning, the drink in his hand was splashing sticky over his fingers as he fumbled to get the door back open.

"The lock's fucked up. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."

He heard a flush and a whisper of fabric and the sink ran and the sink stopped. "B," he answered, jiggling the handle again. "I don't know what I did to it."

She laughed again, and the heat crept down the back of his neck, wrapped its hands around his throat.

"My skirt's down now, you can turn around."

In heels (good ones, five inches, not an amateur) she was almost eye to eye with him, and he found that to be reassuring.

She reached past him, her body flush against his for a moment, and banged on the door with the side of her fist. "'Ay, somebody let us the fuck out of here!"

"I don't think anyone can hear you." Bass reverbed through the floor, agreeing with him. He reached past her, his arms around her for a moment, and twisted the handle. It broke off with soft clank, and he stared at the metal in his hand, everything inside his brain dissipating into white noise as he waits for something, yelling, maybe. She seemed like a yeller.

She screamed instead, with laughter instead, sliding down the wall to land in an incongruous, impossible arrangement of limbs and hair and thousand dollar shoes. "This is fucking amazing," she said, stopping for breath, offering her hand, and he put his drink and the door handle both in the sink so that he could take it and settle down opposite her, folding his legs under him.

"This is the most awful night," he started and stopped. "I'm. Zach."

She smiled at him, her eyes bright like crying and warm like sun. "Zoë." She squeezed his fingers. "You wanna talk about it?"

He wanted to tell her his life story, but settled for truncating it to the most recent pages. "I had a particularly unpleasant dinner engagement earlier this evening, culminating in." He shrugged, made a circular gesture. "Accepting an invitation I didn't really want to, because I didn't want to go home. Alone."

She squeezed his hand again, her teeth flashing. "Fuck that guy, you were too good for him," she said, clearly confident of both assertions, and he didn't bother to deflect the assumption, because she was right and they were locked in a bathroom together and how many secrets can two people really have in eight square feet? Once you've seen someone pee, a certain bond is formed anyway.

"How long do you think it'll take for them to find us?" he wondered, allowing himself to keep holding her hand, toying with her fingers. It felt natural.

"There's another bathroom," she answered, and they both grinned, settling in for the long term.

::

One of these days she's going to renovate her master bath, she keeps saying so, move the shower and put in a big deep tub with jets, like the one he has. One of these days, but for now he's accustomed to coming home from set in the evening, finding the music thumping or maybe crooning, depending on her mood; finding the animals sacked out side by side on the bed; finding her neck deep in bubbles, or sometimes slick with oil, jasmine and rose heavy in the air.

He sheds his layers and she sits forward to make room, he drops in behind her and the water's still just this side of scalding, just right.

Seriously, someone asked once, seriously, you take _baths_ together? As if two people couldn't be naked in the same place without it being sexual, without it meaning anything more than one of them doesn't want to pay to remodel a house she's not sure she's going to keep, and one of them liking the kind of company that smells like flowers and tells really fucking dirty jokes about nuns.

They rinse off in the shower and he washes her hair, she wears his bathrobe and he wears boxers. There's a Mexican place that delivers, not too far away.

::

They have reservations but she isn't ready when he gets there; he flops on her bed and opens the book she's reading, something about economics and aid to Africa which he'd find fascinating if he wasn't starving to death.

"Blood sugar!" he yells, and puts the book back. "If I lapse into a coma--"

"Put a dick in it!" she yells back over the rush of the shower.

Her phone rings and he reaches, thumbs the button without looking at the number. Anybody who'd have this line is someone she'd have given it to, so presumably someone she'd want to hear from. It's reflexive, automatic, they do this with as much ease as they do anything else.

"Hello?" he says, and there's a pause before her boyfriend's voice says, "Zach?"

"Hey, man." It isn't that he doesn't like her boyfriend. It's that he's her boyfriend. "Zo's in the shower."

Another pause, longer this time, and in it he can hear the water stopping, can hear glass doors opening, closing. "Wait," he corrects, "she's done. Hang on."

He delivers the phone, holding it while she wraps her hair and settles on her vanity bench. "Hey baby," he hears as he turns to leave. "What's up?"

He hears.

 _...a little tired of the mutual appreciation society, that's all._

"Don't be a jackass." Her voice is sharp. "It's just dinner."

He takes more steps, he doesn't want to hear this. He rounds the bed, picks up his shoes, there's another door and he is going out it, he's got to get out of here.

"For god's sake, Keith. He's gay."

He's going out the door.

::

She gives him space, a week's worth, two, as much as he wants. She knows him, even though she doesn't appear to know him well enough to know. He has work to do anyway. He has other people in his life.

"Fuck that girl," Kristen says on the phone from Hawaii. "You were too good for her."

"That's sweet, honey." He shrugs, pats the sofa for the dog to hop up. "But not explicitly necessary."

"I'm just saying I know people. I'm from Detroit. I can fix this."

He laughs and Noah barks, the sounds somewhat the same, a release, a relief. "And yet again." He stares up at the ceiling. "It wasn't like she said anything untrue."

"I'm really pissed at you, you know," Kristen says, because she knows better than to give him space, even if he wants it. "You had to go and fall in love with a girl, and it _wasn't me_."

He laughs again. "Next time, okay?"

::

He doesn't hear the key in the lock, despite the silence, but he does hear the door close, a heavy, solid sound, and he does hear the familiar thud thud of a pair of Louboutins being kicked off to land just down the hall. The rustle of shopping bags, the jingle of keys.

Silence now, she's seeing him sitting on her downstairs sofa, elbows on knees, toes pointed away from another at a forty-five degree angle. He thinks that might be a ballet position. Two weeks ago, he'd have asked.

"I would, you know." Her voice is clear, warm and not as smooth as it would like to be. Her chin is up. He notices she's letting her hair curl more these days. Two bracelets slide from up near her elbow to clink clink at her wrist.

"Would what?" He wore contacts for this, because glasses are a tactical disadvantage and he's looking for a fight.

"Go to bed with you."

"You can say fuck."

"So you want a fuck?"

"But for god's sake, I'm gay." He does the thing, the shrug spread hands purse lips oops my mistake thing, and he imagines he looks like a complete asshole and he feels like a complete asshole, but she made him feel like shit, so. It's some kind of logic.

"I didn't mind you hearing that conversation because I didn't think that I was saying something so fucking awful." Her shoulders drop and he follows the movement with his eyes. Her left heel rests against her right big toe, forming a ninety degree angle. "I figured it out, after you bailed, but. How," she says. "How was I supposed to know?"

You were supposed to know because you never pushed when I didn't want to talk. Because I let you bully me into flying across the country at one in the morning. Because there's no such thing as a platonic bath. Because.

This time his shrug is humble, it is sincere. "You knew everything else."

"Oh, baby."

He strains to hear pity in it, condescension, and there is none, there never has been. The sofa dips a little when she settles next to him, her hands on his face force him to look her in the eye.

"I would," she repeats. "If you want to, if you want..." She brushes his hair back from his forehead, kisses the places her fingers have rested.

"I want to," he echoes, resting his forehead against hers. "I want to."

::

It's not just about sex but it's easier if they make it about sex, it's easier if they strip down, press together front to front and kiss. His hands on all the places that make her strange, even though they are familiar to him, even though his hands have been most of those places before, all but one. Her hands on all the places that are that are aching for her, taking possession, taking what he's already given.

Her fingers drift low, in, between, and his teeth graze her shoulder and his legs tremble. "Let me do that," she whispers. "Baby, let me do that for you, not tonight, I need, we need to get the right thing? But please. Let me."

His lips smear over her collarbone, her fingertips press inside. He shakes. "You can have. Anything."

"You too, baby," she whispers back, shifting this way under him, this way, and there. His cock slips against her wet cunt, and it's so unlike what he's used to, so like her. He shifts, trying to find the right spot, and her other hand leaves his hip, comes between them to guide him inside.

His hair is sticking to his forehead, hers is spread out on the pillow; he doesn't know what to do with his hands so he puts them on the backs of her shoulders, up under. He lifts her a little, tilts her body and there is no resistance, just heat, just the glove of her cunt fitting around him.

She changes hands as he waits there, bottomed out and shaking, she takes away the soft pressure and replaces it with cuntslick fingers, determined and deep. His hips stutter and they both moan; he eats it from her mouth and does it again with intent.

A bite on her lip in warning before his hands tighten on her shoulders, this is not so difficult, this is _her_ , this is his cock inside her and he remembers, not from experience but from the deep well inside, this is it, this is us. Rocking now, rising up and fucking harder into her, as hard as he'd fuck a man and she still asks for more, twists her cunt around his cock, her voice humid and begging in his ear.

Her hand slips free of him and she says sorry, sorry, even as she digs her fingertips into the small of his back and tightens her thighs on his hips. I don't need it, he tries to answer. I just need you.

"You," he breathes, shoving forward, hearing her sob an answer, the same answer. Just you.

::

They spent the night in the bathroom, stuck there until someone sobered up enough to figure it out maybe, or maybe it was just that people were sharing some lines in the other one and somebody really needed to piss.

It was about four hours by his watch, and they talked about how it was good that neither of them were claustrophobic; he admitted that was afraid of roaches and she confessed that she hated the sight of blood. He asked her if that made things difficult, you know, on a monthly basis, and she punched him so hard in the arm that he carried the imprint of her ring for days.

Something in his mind was turning, tumblers rolling and clicking into place. He wanted to talk to her forever, or at least until they both ran out of breath, maybe sixty, seventy years from now. He watched the sweat bead on her lip as the room grew more stuffy, he watched her watch him talk with his hands and then pull them back in, tucking them under his armpits.

In the end, he offered her his shoulder and she took him up on it, nodding off in his arms. He breathed in her perfume, rested his cheek on her hair, and didn't care if they were ever rescued, because it was variable values of rescue, really. Rescue implies that the situation is unwanted, and while the situation had certainly been unplanned, it wasn't exactly the worst thing in the world, toilet and all, but then the door burst open and he thought it might not matter anyway.

Outside the air was cool and morning was creeping around corners, honking horns and reeking of diesel fuel. "I know a café," he said and pointed in one direction.

"I know a diner," she countered, and waved in the other. Her hair was coming down and blowing around her face, and her smile was bright and wide.

"Right," he said, taking her hand. "I'm with you."


End file.
